As an online game is continuously popular, a game industry has rapidly grown. Further, serious games applicable to education, training, medical treatment, and exercise have attracted great attention.
The serious games are structured activities designed by combining an original purpose of entertaining humans to have happiness and fun and a proper functional purpose of helping humans in doing disagreeable activities without aversion. In early days, the serious games were designed for military purpose. In recent years, the serious games have been developed and used in various genres and in various fields, such as education, training, medical treatment and public services.
Meanwhile, a cognitive ability is a primary faculty for mental activities and may be involved in all processes of rapidly and efficiently processing and analyzing information from the surrounding environment. That is, the terms “cognition” refers to active metal processes including awareness, attention, remembering, learning, producing and understanding language, thinking, feeling, solving problems, and doing skilled activities.
If there is a lack of a cognitive ability, a child may have developmental disabilities or developmental delays and also may have a speech defect, an attention disorder, and poorness of processing information, which may cause him/her difficulty in leading a social life.
Therefore, a cognitive ability testing service for checking a decline or delay in a cognitive ability and a service helpful for developing a cognitive ability through a training of repeated use of the cognitive ability to prevent a decline or delay in the cognitive ability have attracted great attention.
As a conventional cognitive ability test, there are Korean-Wechsler Intelligence Scale, Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC), KWIS, and Ray-Kim Test as one of Korean memory test.
To be specific, Korean-Wechsler Intelligence Scale is used to measure an intelligent quotient (IQ) through subtests including a verbal test and a performance test, and K-ABC is used to measure an IQ and achievement through a mental processing test and an achievement test and places more emphasis on mental processing. KWIS is made up of a verbal scale and a performance scale including various subtests such as general information, picture completion, arithmetic, and the like and used to generally assess a personal ability. Ray-Kim Test places more emphasis on memory and is made up of an auditory verbal learning test and a complex figure test to measure a degree of memory retention, an efficiency of retrieval, and the like.
Such conventional cognitive ability tests have been used to measure a cognitive ability as defined in each test. However, they focus on only a part of cognitive ability such as an IQ or memory. Therefore, a cognitive ability test capable of generally measuring a cognitive ability having various functions as well as a memory function is needed.
Generally, conventional cognitive ability measurement and development services have been served offline. That is, a user who wants to get a cognitive ability measurement and development service is required to visit a specialize agency such as a hospital and based on an expert's analysis on the user's answers in written form or questions and answers during an interview, the user can check his/her own cognitive ability or can get a training for developing his/her own cognitive ability.
Therefore, the conventional cognitive ability measurement and development services have low accessibility due to insufficient special agencies, a long time required to provide a service, high cost and a user's inconvenience caused by a personal visit. Further, a cognitive ability measurement entirely depends on experience and knowledge of an expert and statistical data based thereon, and, thus, reliability of the service cannot be improved. Furthermore, the questions and answers for the conventional cognitive ability measurement and development are made up of boring contents, and, thus, the user may lose interest easily.
In order to measure and develop cognitive abilities by means of serious games, various types of serious games need to be developed. In order to do so, a serious game development environment in which various developers can develop various serious games freely to make profits needs to be promoted. Therefore, while various serious games are developed in different ways, a common platform capable of executing such various serious games in a integrated way is needed.
In this regard, Korean Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2009-0010874 (entitled “System and method for developing cognitive function based on web service and recording medium using by the same”) discloses a system for measuring and developing cognitive abilities by means of a web service.